Thread by @sama

Today OpenAI launched Codex, which is an API that uses AI to write code from natural language.

There's a demo video here: openai.com/blog/openai-co…

It is a rudimentary version of what will be possible, but it really works and will get better fast. Today we can correctly complete a function from our evaluation set about 37% of the time. It's also just really fun to use, and brings back the early joy of programming for me.

I think Codex gets close to what most of us really want from computers—we say what we want, and they do it.

Programming languages are an artifact of computers not being able to actually understand us, and humans and computers relying on a lingua franca to understand each other.

I’m not even sure I understand what the word “understand” really means anymore, but AI is on its way to a good enough facsimile of if to allow for a new type of computer interface—we saw what we want, and the computer does it, no intermediate steps required.

It will take a long time for the technology to get good enough, but eventually we may forget that used computers any other way. As more things becomes API-ified, AI systems that write code can easily make a lot of things happen in the world.

This is an example of an important and somewhat counterintuitive trend in AI—cognitive labor is going to change sooner than physical labor.

This will also, I think, be an example of AI rapidly accelerating jobs--programmers in the future will be much more productive than programmers today and able to do things we can barely imagine.